Ben-Eliezer: Arafat not to be target

Israeli defense minister, Palestinians press on

Published: Saturday, September 01, 2001

JERUSALEM {AP} Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops exchanged fire in three areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Friday, and 19 Palestinians were wounded. Despite the fighting, the two sides pressed on with efforts to arrange truce talks, but no time and place were set.

Israel's defense minister, meanwhile, said he would never sanction an attack on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as part of Israel's targeted killings of suspected militants.

"I will not permit an attack on Arafat, not because he isn't involved in terror, but because I'm not convinced that this will solve the problem," the minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, told the Maariv daily. An attack on Arafat, Ben-Eliezer said, "could come back to us like a boomerang and not do any good."

One of Arafat's lieutenants in the West Bank, meanwhile, said the Palestinian leader has steered the 11-month uprising. "I think that President Arafat is not only supporting the uprising, but also the leader of it," Marwan Barghouti, a leader of Arafat's Fatah movement, said in an interview broadcast on Israel TV's Channel 2.

Israel has long charged that Arafat has directed the violence in hopes of extracting concessions from Israel in negotiations. Arafat has denied he is behind attacks on Israelis by Palestinian militants. He has suggested he is doing everything he can to stop the violence, but that he cannot go against the popular mood.

In the West Bank town of Ramallah, Qais Abdel Karim, the No. 2 in a radical PLO faction, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claimed he narrowly escaped an Israeli attack when a bomb exploded in his apartment building.

Palestinian security officials declined comment on the incident. Neighbors said the bomb went off in an apartment belonging to an activist in the Islamic militant group Hamas, suggesting it exploded inadvertently.